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[Star Wars Destiny] - FFG Goes to the Collectible Dark Side

The masters of Living Card Games, Fantasy Flight, have created their first Collectible Card Game in a long time: Star Wars Desiny. Destiny is unique for its large, laser-etched dice tied to special cards. Decks are exactly 30 cards (20 in the two starter packs; anything else must be 30.)

Opposing players can win the game by defeating their opponent's Character cards, which have Force points (life) or when an opponent's deck and hand are gone. Character cards are always on the battlefield and are the primary subject of play. Players can expand their characters strength by playing Upgrade cards on them and adding that upgrade's respective die to the character. There are also Support cards, which activate special abilities, such as messing with the results of your dice, or your opponents, and single use abilities.

Deckbuilding Rules
* Decks are exactly 30 cards (the exception is dueling starter decks, which are exactly 20 cards.) Characters and Battlefields are not cards. A deck is composed exclusively of of Events, Upgrades and Supports.
* No more than two of any card, like Hearthstone
* There are three primary tribes, Hero and Villain. A deck cannot have both Heroes and Villains
* There are four subtribes, depicted by the color of the card. Blue (Force,) Red (Command), Yellow (Rogue) and Gray (Neutral.) A deck can only have neutrals and colors that match their Character cards.

The 30 deck limit is the only rule the starters break. The Kylo Ren starter is a Villain tribal deck and the Rey starter is a Hero tribal deck. Inspecting both more closely, they each have two Characters that dictate the cards that may go into the deck. Both have some neutral cards.

The Kylo starter gives you Kylo Ren and First Order Stormtrooper as your two characters. Kylo is Force (Blue), the Stormtrooper is Command (Red) and both are villains. So the deck only contains Force and Command cards of the Villain and Neutral tribes.

The Rey starter gives you Rey (Force) and Finn (Rogue), and they are heroes. Therefore, this deck only contains Force and Rogue cards of the Hero and Neutral tribes.

Taught one friend how to play this a few days ago, and another how to play today. Both enjoyed the experience, and we just used the Tutorial decks for simplicity, but the response remained "yeah no way I'm buying into a collectible style game", which I can totally understand. Even if I think that the card pool size, deck size, and max of 2 of each card, along with the existence of the secondary market make it a less egregious 'ccg' than many, it's still not a cheap thing to get into however we cut it. Sure, a pair of Starters and a few boosters won't break the bank, but let's be honest here.

Not to say that I'm down on the game. I'm hoping to play some at the local store in the coming weeks, and starting around February at least one is looking to have semi-regular tournaments, and if there's even a casual tournament at Gencon I could see playing in that (as I hope to attend).

I've got a stash of cards that haven't been added to the decks yet, but I might try my hand at upgrading the starters this week. Maybe just add 10 new cards to each and see what happens. Round out the characters a little.

I'm trying not to jump into this one too deeply, but if there's a decent sale on a booster box in my area or an online shop with non-obnoxious Canadian shipping, I could see an afternoon of cracking packs.

I'm also seeing some shops starting to offer singles, and at least one local store says they hope to do so soon, so that'll be a nice way to cost effectively round out the collection a little. No way I'm chasing these absurd $40 per card auctions, but a few of the cheaper commons/uncommons/characters would be nice to have without praying to RNGesus.

I fear that FFG is already to plot some bullshit meta by cranking out lots of "unblockable damage" cards.

The dice are freaking sweet, but storage will be a challenge. There are two major challenges with dice. First, they are tied to specific cards. For each special card, there is a die with the card's artwork on it. Someone is going to have to come up with an all new storage scheme just for this game. Second, you are supposed to conceal your dice during play until the appropriate card hits the table, which means you need a second storage during play. Luckily, the starter boxes include a pretty good solution, which are dice trays. The cover of the trays is clear plastic, so you need to take a sheet of paper over it or paint it.

The cover of the trays is clear plastic, so you need to take a sheet of paper over it or paint it.

Or just flip the box around so the solid back is on top.

A competitive (read: timed) setting will require some logistical work. I'm sure when people have a lot of games under their belt things will move quickly, but if a match is 2 or 3 games, the time fiddling around to find the right die for a card will add up between two players and multiple games. I suppose they could be slightly longer 1 off battles, but I might be getting a bit ahead of myself here.

As for mechanics, the way shields show up on dice, and the cards that already clear all shields, indicate to me that there'll be things shifting those mechanics and playing in the design space, but I'm not so sure about cranking out tons of bullshit unblockable damage cards. At the very least, we'll have to wait and see what the next wave looks like, and far as I've seen they haven't even announced the follow up set or when that'll be (which isn't surprising of course, the game just officially landed a few weeks ago).

New expansion is rumored to be out on Celebration day, and they're ramping up production + re-printing awakenings as well as releasing Spirit of the Rebellion. I dig this game a lot, I just wish it wasn't so supply strapped.